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Talk:Girl Meets STEM/@comment-5679407-20160109200657/@comment-26999065-20160110204233
Mr. Norton did NOT assign who got which tasks. He went out of his way to say it was up to team to decide who did what. Of course he must have assigned the boy/girl teams to run his little social experiment in the first place, but he never said the girls had to drop the marbles, so you’re wrong in saying the professor assigned that task to the girls based on their sex. And I’d say that the belief Riley “antagonized” her male classmates is a bit of an overstatement of what she did. And yes, Riley could have gone to Farkle, but that would have addressed her personal problem and not the larger phenomenon she witness that somehow, almost inexplicably, nothing but girls were assigned to be marble droppers. It demonstrated a social tendency she didn’t like, albeit perhaps an unconscious one on the part of her male classmates. And it should have been addressed. You might even say the entire point of the teacher’s experiment WAS to demonstrate this flaw and give his students a chance to address it - so it would no longer be an uncoscious tendency since they've been made aware of it. For the record, a sexist person isn’t one who makes one sexist conclusion or comment, but one who routinely makes them and sees nothing wrong in it. This is not Riley. She immediately withdrew her one erroneous accusation when she obtained better information – i.e. Farkle explained himself. But the fact she based this conclusion on the observation that all the girls were made marble droppers and none of the guys were does make the inference a reasonable one. She just quickly abandoned the belief that Farkle was sexist in light of new data, as any decent scientist would. Calling her sexist is a huge overstatement of what actually happened. I don’t believe the claim that feminism is about equality between the sexes is just a smokescreen. It's pretty much the definition of feminism. It’s like the Black Lives matter campaign. It’s not suggesting that other lives or white lives don’t also matter, but that there’s something in society where it would seem as if some people are operating under the assumption that, unlike other lives, black lives don’t matter, or matter less somehow. It points out the social injustice that is CLEARLY happening. And feminism does the same, not by saying men are less important, but some people are treating women as if they are less important or less capable. It’s wrong. Note that I said this is not just men who do this, but people, since many women do it, too, and even if a woman does it, that doesn’t make it right. As Topanga said, women tend to fill the roles they feel others expect of them. They are less aggressive than men, so often feel compelled to accept lesser roles, or start a fight, and who wants to fight? I won’t deny, however, there’s a subset of the feminist movement that I call Militant Feminism, whose ranks do tend to use the feminist arguments as a smokescreen for their ulterior motives, but I would never claim they are in the majority of all feminists, or that they run the feminist movement. They don’t. But Riley’s problem is she discovered that women often tend to let men define their roles for them. As Sarah said, I don’t stand up for myself. This probably comes from the unfortunate consequences of what happens or has happened in the past when she did stand up for herself. Something bad. And if you don’t think this is happening, you haven’t heard enough guys call women who disagree with the roles assign to them by their male counterparts, or do stand up for themselves, as bossy, bitches, or worse. They also get treated differently. Usually unfairly. If you think that doesn’t happen with alarming regularity, then you’re missing the point and you’re probably part of the problem. Lastly, while I’ll concede many unlikely things happen is these Disney shows, I challenge you to tell me that you’d watch a show where unusual things don’t regularly happen. Would you watch a show about school kids where they spend most of the time reading, studying, and doing nothing particularly extraordinary – which is what happens most of time in real life? I don’t think you’d watch that. So I’ll dismiss the notion that too many unrealistic things are happening in the show. Most shows are like that. So what?